Twitter has made changes to its "quote tweet" function to allow users to say more regarding the original message that they have decided to retweet.
The change in the functionality will now be embedding the original tweet, as opposed to displaying the quoted tweet as a text version, Twitter announced. The updated quote tweet function now also allows users to include commentary to the quoted tweet with a limit of 116 characters.
Twitter's update to the quote tweet functions looks to address the major issue that users of the social network have over it, which is that previously, using the function provided the users with so little room to add their own commentary to the retweets, which defeated the purpose of quoting tweets.
The new quote tweet functions shows the push of Twitter to increase the engagement of the users with the social network, which is something that investors are hoping would lead to higher levels of revenue from advertising.
Increasing user engagement prompted the social network back in August of last year to unveil a new feature that would show users tweets coming from accounts that they are not following, which is a significant change from the long-standing convention that Twitter users will only see tweets being sent out by accounts they are following, in addition to retweets and promoted tweets. With the same goal in mind, Twitter released a new feature earlier this year in January named Recap that shows users tweets that are considered to be the most relevant to the user that were posted while the users were not on Twitter. This feature makes sure that users see the tweets most important to them.
In February, Twitter said that it now has 288 million users that are actively using its service monthly, which is a slight but significant increase from the 284 million monthly active users that were reported in the third quarter of last year. While the figure does not reach Wall Street's goal for Twitter of 295 million active users monthly, investors were happy to receive the news, prompting and increase in share price of over 23 percent in the past couple of months.
The new quote tweet feature is part of the overall scheme to increase user engagement, and is now being rolled out to all users on the Web and on iOS devices. However, for users on Android devices, the update is not yet available but has been said will be coming soon.
